Our Story

Younger Years

Beau Berman grew up in Tulsa, OK, the oldest of three children. He is the son of a Jewish man and a Catholic woman, both of whom converted to Christianity shortly before he was born. His family attended a fundamentalist church, and Beau grew up with the idea that God was almost always angry with him. It wasn’t until high school that Beau discovered the gracious and unconditional love of God through a parachurch ministry called Young Life. He became heavily involved with Young Life, and later became a volunteer leader in college. He then became a volunteer leader at his own high school after he graduated from college.

Seminary & Work Experience

Beau tried working in the sales world, but quickly figured out that what he wanted to do with his life was to help people like himself who had the wrong idea of who God was to see the beauty of God’s grace. So he decided to go to Dallas Theological Seminary, where he obtained the two-year “youth pastor degree.” He was a high school minister for one year, then accepted a job working with college students at a church in Memphis, TN. As a college pastor, he received many invitations to speak, preach, and teach, and the more he did it, the more he realized that he had obtained the wrong degree. So, after three years of successful college ministry, he and Shannon took their 2 kids back to Dallas to obtain the Master of Theology degree from DTS. During that time, Beau worked with young adults at a large mega-church in Dallas, and he and Shannon had their 3rd child. During the 2nd stint at seminary, Beau discovered church planting, and started feeling God’s call to plant a church in Tulsa, OK.

Journey Back to Tulsa

In the summer of 2008, Beau took a church-planting class. Through that process, he began his application to be a church planter with the Acts 29 Network, a reformed, church-planting organization founded by Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll. Finally, after 3 months of doing all of the application steps that the Acts 29 organization required, he made it to the final interview, where the assessment team told Beau and Shannon that while they felt sure of Beau’s calling to plant a church, they didn’t think he was ready. So they told him to complete a 2-3 year internship with an Acts 29-type church. Beau accepted their advice and began his search for a church to intern at, but after 7 months of searching, he was still coming up short. With just one month remaining until his graduation in August of 2009, he felt God’s calling to plant a church in Tulsa stronger than ever before. The problem was he didn’t know of any reformed, missional, Gospel-centered churches in Tulsa. He was confused; he didn’t know why God wasn’t opening the doors for him to intern somewhere, and instead seemed to be opening the door for him to move to Tulsa?

Church Planting

Beau and Shannon, sensing God’s call to move to Tulsa, took a step of faith and blindly followed God’s leading. They started a church on Sunday evenings in the basement of a real estate company in Tulsa. In the mornings, Beau and his family would go to different churches to get ideas for their own church. One day, they stumbled into Redeemer Presbyterian Church. When Beau heard pastor Ricky’s sermon, he thought, “This guy gets it!” He tried to become friends with Ricky, and eventually, Ricky asked Beau to be his intern, with the promise of launching him out as the lead pastor of a daughter church in 3 years. Ricky, not too long after that, became a part of the Acts 29 Network. It seemed God had been planning all of this from the very start. Ethos Presbyterian Church launched in January 2013.